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Illinois Classical Studies, I The Parodos of Aristophanes' Wasps TIMOTHY LONG Recent criticism has attempted to rehabilitate the evaluation of the con- struction of Aristophanes' Wasps. ^ The great difficulty in defending the quality of the play is the relationship of the first part with its theme of "juryitis" to the second with its attempts to reeducate Philokleon. This essay, however, confines itself to the parodos and is concerned both with a recent suggestion regarding the text which has gained limited acceptance and with demonstrating a dramatic connection between the parodos and the remainder of the first half of the comedy. The parodos can be divided into four sections. In the first (230-247) the chorus gradually assembles as the koryphaios, accompanied by his son, singles out individual colleagues and urges them to greater speed. 2 It is 1 U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, "Uber die Wespen," SPAW (191 1), 472 ( = Kleine Schriften, [1935], i, 298), and A. Lesky, A History of Greek Literature (New York, 1966), 435, are among the severest critics. P. Mazon, Essai sur la Composition des Comedies d'Aristo- phane (Paris, 1904), 80, is the most enthusiastic of the older critics. Among more recent favorable critics are C. H. Whitman, Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, 1964), 156-161; L. Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes (New York and London, 1966), 132-35; D. M. MacDowell, Aristophanes: Wasps (Oxford, 197 1), 4-7; T. Gelzer, "Aristophanes," RE, Sup. 12 (197 1), 1449, 27 AT.; J. Vaio, "Aristophanes' Wasps: The Relevance of the Final Scenes," GRBS, 12 (1971), 335-351. 2 Grammatical peculiarities, e.g. 230 and 233, repeated commands and supposed logical disjunctions, as between 239 and 240, 258 and 259, were interpreted at the end of the last century as indications of conversational exchange between individual members of the chorus. Cf. F. Bamberger, De carminibus Aeschyleis a partibus chori cantatis (Marburg, 1832) ; R. Arnoldt, De choro Aristophanis quaestiones scaenicae (diss. Konigsberg, 1868), 1 1 ff., and Die Chorpartien bei Aristophanes (Leipzig, 1873), 7 ff. ; C. Muff, Vber den Vortrag der chorischen Partien bei Aristophanes (Halle, 1872); G. Hermann, "De choro Vesparum Aristophanis," Opuscula, viii (Leipzig, 1877), 253-267; F. G. Allison, "A Proposed Redistribution of Parts in the Parodos of the Vespae," AJPh, i (1880), 402-9; C. Robert, "Zu Aristophanes Wespen," Hermes, 44 (1909), 159-160. Wilamowitz, SPAW, 486, n. i, 6 — 1 Illinois Classical Studies, I still dark as the chorus enters and so the son of the koryphaios carries a lamp to light the way. In the second section (248-272) the chorus leader tells his son to trim the lamp. The boy does this clumsily and is scolded and struck by his father. The lad threatens to desert his father and leave him to stumble on his way in the dark if he does not stop his abuse. The father swears he can punish anyone he pleases, and then, in an ironic double-take, he slips in the mud. That mishap occasions a meteorological excursus. He ends his reflections by marveling at Philokleon's absence and calls on his fellow jurors to summon their colleague from the house. The third section (273-290) is the first song of the assembled chorus. They speculate on what may be keeping as dependable and formidable a juror as Philokleon from joining them and then tempt him to participate in the prosecution of another traitor. In the fourth section (291-315) the son asks his father for a present, to which the father at first agrees but then learning that the son wants laxdSes—refuses.^ When the son protests that he will no longer accompany his father, the koryphaios reminds the boy that he must support a family of three with his juror's dole. The parodos ends in a paratragic threnody. The son asks his father if the family can buy dinner if the courts do not sit. The father can't guarantee it, and the son answers with a lament from Euripides' Theseus, undercut by his father. strongly opposed this "Chorzersplitterung." The phenomena which had led Hermann to derive this theory were not so inconsequential as Wilamowitz would have us believe. They are now explained by maintaining that the chorus does not come into the orchestra as a group but instead slowly assembles there. P. Haendel, Formen und Darstellungsweisen in der Aristophanischen Komodie (Heidelberg, 1963), 35: "Die Orchester ist also nicht der Ort des Einzugs, genau genommen, sondern der Ort der Versammlung des Chors, der sich allmahlich formiert." See also E. Roos, Die tragische Orchestik im ^errbild der altattischen Komodie (Stockholm, 1951), 151-52. 3 Wilamowitz' paraphrase of 291-294 {SPAW, 489) represents the unquestioned interpretation of translators and commentators: "Vater, willst du mir wohl was kaufen?" "Gern, wohl Murmeln?" "Nein, Feigen schmeckt siisser." The boy's answer (iJStov yap) can hardly be an acceptable reason for preference if the suggestion made by the father is a set of dice. Where the reading aoTpayaXovs now stands in our text, there was once the accusative plural of the word for some item of food neither so expensive nor sweet as laxahe?. One logical candidate is the last meaning of aoTpayaXos in Liddell and Scott : a leguminous vegetable. Dioscorides, De Re Medica 3, 61, offers ten possibilities for the plant, beginning with aarpdyaXos- ol 8e laxaSes- Hesychius Alexandrinus, Lexicon, ed. K. Latte (Copenhagen, 1963), s.v. aarpayaXT^, offers another word which would fit: doTpayaXrj- rj r^? tpewg pi^a. Theophrastus, HP, i, 73, describes the root: iSi'a ttj? pl^rjs <f>vais kuI SvvafusTijs IvSiKTJs avK^s. MacDowell, 175, remarks that the devastation of Attica must have made figs a rarity: "All the same, the fact that the old juror regards them as an expensive luxury is a sign that he is very poor indeed." Either the juror volunteers his son a cheap substitute for laxdSfs, or else Aristophanes is playing a pun on the more usual meaning of darpayaAos. ^ 7 Parodos of Aristophanes' Wasps 1 The scene concludes as Philokleon leans out his window and addresses his companions. The separation of the two dialogues between the father and his son has long been regarded as disturbing.'* Srebrny has suggested a transposition of verses which would produce one connected dialogue between the two.^ He maintains that originally the second dialogue between the father and son (291-315) followed immediately upon the meteorological discussion ending at 265, forming one extended conversation. At the end of the dialogue came the remaining tetrameters (266-272) which urge the chorus to call Philokleon from the house. The chorus then sang its invita- tion to Philokleon to join it (273-290), which was followed immediately by Philokleon's answer (316 ff.). The effect of this alteration is to make the action of the parodos more direct. The chorus enters, there is a continuous conversation between the father and son, the chorus calls its companion from his house, but he answers that he cannot join them. Now this suggested change has found formal support. Russo has pointed out that a metrical pattern typical of Aristophanes' parodoi results from the proposed rearrangement.^ He observes that in the parodoi of the Peace (301-336) and of the Wealth (253-289) Aristophanes uses consecutive pairs of "moduli" of eighteen tetrameters. If Srebrny's suggestion is adopted, a somewhat similar pattern will be formed by the tetrameters of 230-247 and 248-265. MacDowell, in his edition of the Wasps, does not rearrange the verses of the parodos, but he admits that he was sorely tempted by Srebrny's suggestion and Russo's corroboration.^ The objections are more forceful. The chief factor which held Mac- Dowell back from adopting Srebrny's suggestion in his edition was metrical. Verses 230-247 are catalectic iambic tetrameters, but 248-272 are aawapT-qra Ei5/3t77i8eta, or syncopated catalectic iambic tetrameters. Unlike the pairs of eighteen tetrameters in the Wealth and the Peace, the two sections in the Wasps would be in different meters. In the end, MacDowell elects to consider the syncopated verses as a unit and not to divide them into two sections. ^ See E. Brentano, Untersuchungen iiber das griechische Drama (Frankfurt, 1871). 178, and J. van Leeuwen, Aristophanis Vespae (Leiden, 1893), ad loc. 5 S. Srebrny, "Aristophanea," Eos, 50 (1959/60), 44-45, independently of van Leeuwen. ^ C. F. Russo, "Le Vespe Spaginate e un Modulo di Tetrametri 18 x 2," Belfagor. 23 (1968), 317-24. '^ MacDowell, 169. F. Perusino, // Tetrametro Giambico Catalettico (Rome, 1968), 35, n. I, accepts Srebrny's and Russo's suggestion. 8 On the syncopated iambic tetrameter catalectic see Hephaestionis Enchiridion, ed. ; Westphal, Metrik der M. Cpnsbruch (Leipzig, 1906), 53, 5-1 1 A. Rossbach and R. Griechen (Leipzig, 1867), 203; Wilamowitz, Griechische Verskunst (Berlin, 1921), 231. ,; i8 Illinois Classical Studies, I That is a commendable decision, but there are other reasons as well for retaining the text as transmitted. Philokleon's answer to the chorus is difficult to reconcile to this interpretation {(f>iXoi, rrjKOfxaL /xev 77-aAat . 316-317). riaAai is disastrous for Srebrny's argument. Philokleon has in fact heard the chorus and has been listening, and there is evidence in the text that he does not answer when he first hears himself being called. Moreover, this is consistent with the dramaturgy of the parodos in Aristophanes. As has been mentioned, the great virtue of the proposed change would be that the action of the parodos would become more direct however, the action of the Aristophanic parodos is often neither logical nor direct. In the Acharnians, the chorus enters at 240 and declares its intention to attack the man who would betray his city and strike a separate treaty (235), but when Dikaiopolis actually appears (241), the chorus postpones its attack and lies in ambuscade until 280, while its enemy's family conducts its procession.
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